The present invention generally relates to the design of Web sites and interrelationships between the Web sites.
Currently, for anyone who has tried to locate specific information or a specific set of suppliers of a particular good or service over the Internet, a user has to use a typical search engine, such as Yahoo®, Excite® or Lycos®. Unfortunately, Internet search engines are unable to ask a series of pointed questions to help a user focus his or her search. Therefore, they must rely on the particular search engine's algorithm in order to rank the millions of web pages thereby determining the Web sites that best fit a given search term the user has inputted into the search engine. Thus, users typically select Web sites listed at the top of the list provided by the search engine. Consequently, Web site designers often design their Web sites with the goal of having their Web site listed at the top of search engine lists thereby increasing the number of hits to their Web site. However, a particular search engine's algorithm is typically a closely guarded trade secret. Nevertheless, most major search engines follow the same general rules.
Generally, a particular search engine's algorithm, at least preliminarily, ranks various web pages based upon the location and frequency of keywords on a web page. For example, pages containing a particular user search term, the domain name or in the header/title html tags, are typically more relevant than others to the topic being searched by the user. Consequently, web pages having a particular search term in the header tag are often assumed to be more relevant by the search algorithm. Search engines also check to see if a user's search term appears near the top of the page. The search engine's algorithm assumes that any page relevant to the topic will mention the user's search term in the headline or in the first few paragraphs of the text.
Frequency is another major factor search engines use to determine relevancy of a web page to a specific user's search term. A search engine will analyze how frequently keywords appear in relation to other words on a web page, a document on the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web is a system of Internet servers. A server is a computer or device in a network that is used to provide services to other computers or devices in the network. The web pages where the user's search term appears with a higher frequency are often deemed more relevant than other web pages.
Some search engines utilize other ingredients to further qualify the typical location and frequency algorithm method described above. One of the most often used fields that are searched is a Web site's hidden metatags. However, not all search engines read metatags. Metatags are simply a placeholder for storing information that may or may not be processed by an HTTP server or indexed by a search engine.
The final main feature most search engines use to rank and display the most relevant web pages to the user's search query includes an analysis of how pages link to each other. In this manner, a search engine can better determine what a Web site is about and whether the Web site deserves a higher ranking Links to other related Web sites outside of a given Web site typically result in a higher ranking. Some search engines also screen out attempts by computer users to build into their Web sites false links, which the Web site designer would include in an attempt to boost their rankings.
Unfortunately, a person/user attempting to locate goods or services on a particular topic using a conventional search engine may be successful in locating a few Web sites corresponding to an insignificant number of the goods and services providers corresponding to their area of interest. Searching using this technique is very laborious and time consuming, especially for a professional or business person who needs quick access to information about various suppliers of goods and services in order to compare the various suppliers and decide which supplier would best fulfill their needs. Often times, a conventional search will reveal only two or three suppliers of particular goods, but will not locate the Web sites of many other commercial suppliers of a good or service whose Web sites may not achieve, for whatever reason, as high ranking on a particular search engine.
Consequently, there is a significant need for a goods and service directory, which can easily be located using a conventional search engine accessible using a computer, which is a programmable, usually electronic, device that can store, retrieve, and process data, to access the conventional search engine on the Internet, which is an electronic communications network that connects computer networks and organizational computer facilities around the world. There is also a significant need for the directory to include numerous links to a variety of goods and services suppliers related to a particular topic while providing easy and quick navigation to and from any number of supplier Web sites so that the user can find out more detailed information than that which is provided by the directory.